We are on the threshold of a new century, a new millennium. What will the legacy of this vanishing century
be? How will it be remembered in the new millennium?
Surely it will be judged, and judged severely, in both moral
and metaphysical terms. These failures have cast a dark
shadow over humanity: two World Wars, countless civil
wars, the senseless chain of assassinations (Gandhi, the
Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Sadat, Rabin), bloodbaths in
Cambodia and Algeria, India and Pakistan, Ireland and
Rwanda, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Sarajevo and Kosovo; the
inhumanity in the gulag and the tragedy of Hiroshima. And,
on a different level, of course, Auschwitz and Treblinka. So
much violence; so much indifference.
Elie Wiesel, "The Perils of Indifference," 1999
What is Wiesel trying to do in this passage?